Project description

MOAI, an Open Access Server Platform for Institutional Repositories

MOAI is a platform for aggregating content from different sources, and publishing it through the Open Archive Initiatives protocol for metadata harvesting.
It’s been built for academic institutional repositories dealing with relational metadata and asset files.

What does it do?

The MOAI software can aggregate content from different sources, transform it and store it in a database. The contents of this database can then be published in many separate OAI feeds, each with its own configuration.

The MOAI software has a very flexible system for combining records into sets, and can use these sets in the feed configuration. It also comes with a simple yet flexible authentication scheme that can be easily customized. Besides providing authentication for the feeds, the authentication also controls the access to the assets.

Why MOAI

MOAI has been specifically developed for universities, and contains a lot of hard-earned wisdom. The software has been in production use since 2007, and new features have been continually added. In late 2008, the software was completely refactored and packaged under the name “MOAI”. You can read more about this on the MOAI History page.

MOAI is a standalone system, so it can be used in combination with any repository software that comes with an OAI feed such as Fedora Commons, EPrints or DSpace. It can also be used directly with an SQL database or just a folder of XML files.

The MOAI project takes the philosophy that every repository is different and unique, and that an institutional repository is a living thing. It is therefore never finished. Metadata is always changes, improving, and evolves. We think this is healthy.

Because of this viewpoint, the MOAI software makes it as easy as possible to add or modify parts of your repository (OAI) services stack. It tries to do this without sacrificing power, and encouraging the re-use of components.

Features

MOAI has some interesting features not found in most OAI servers.
Besides serving OAI, it can also harvest OAI. This makes it possible for MOAI to work as a pipe, where the OAI data can be reconfigured, cached, and enriched while it passes through the MOAI processing.

More specifically MOAI has the ability to:

Harvest data from different kinds of sources

Serve many OAI feeds from one MOAI server, each with their own configuration

Turn metadata values into OAI sets on the fly, creating new collections

Use OAI sets to filter records shown in a feed, configurable for each feed

Work easily with relational data (e.g. if an author changes, the publication should also change)

Simple and robust authentication through integration with the Apache webserver

Serve assets via Apache while still using configurable authentication rules

Installing MOAI

The MOAI Software can be run in any wsgi compliant server.

MOAI comes with a development server that can be used for testing. In production mod_wsgi can be used to run Moai in the apache webserver.

Installation Steps

MOAI is a normal python package. It is tested with python2.5 and 2.6.
I recommend creating a virtualenv to install the package in.

This makes development and deployment easier.
Instructions below are for unix, but MOAI should also work on Windows

Go into the MOAI directory with the setup.py, and run the virtualenv command

> cd moai
> virtualenv .

Now, activate the virtualenv

> source bin/activate

Install MOAI in the virtualenv using pip

> pip install -e .

(this will take a while)

When this process finishes, Moai and all its dependencies will be installed.

Running in development mode

The development server should never be used for production, it is convenient for testing and development. Note that you should always activate the virtualenv otherwise the dependecies will not be found

When you run the update_moai script again, it will create a new database with all the records (in this case moai_example.db). It is also possible to specify a data with the –date switch. When a data is specified, only records that were modified after this date will be added.
The update_moai script can be run from a daily or hourly cron job to update the database

Adding your own Provider / Content and Metadata Classes

It’s possible and most of the time, needed, to extend Moai for your use-cases.
The Provider and Content classes from the example might be a good starting point if you want to do that. All your customizations should be registered with Moai through entry_points. Have a look at Moais setup.py for more information.
The best approach would be to create your own python package with setup.py and install this in the same environment as Moai. This will let Moai find your customizations. Note that when you change something in your setup.py, you have to reinstall the package, for Moai to pick up the changes.

Note that the moai.interfaces file contains documentation about the different classes that you can implement.

Adding your own Database

Instead of writing your own provider/content classes, you can also register your own custom database. Implementing a replacement for moai.database.SQLDatabase can be more complicated then writing a provider/content class, but it has the advantage that Moai is always up to date, and you don’t need a second sqlite database.

Have a look at the setup.py file from the MOAI code, it registers several databases. You could use this mechanism to register your own database from your own python package.

In the settings.ini you configuration you can then reference your database (‘mydb://some+config+variables’).

For the database, have a look at the generic database provider in database.py. The only methods that you need to implement are: oai_sets, oai_earliest_datestamp and oai_query.
The oai_query method returns dictionaries with record data. The keys of these dictionaries are defined in the metadata files (for example metadata.py), have a look at the source.

MOAI Changes

MOAI 2.0.0 (2013-02-28)

First public release in the 2.x series, switched to mod_wsgi,
smaller simpler codebase, pluggability through entry_points instead of ZCA.

New docs and examples, simpler direct integration with external databases

Update mods format and support for EU GAL metadata MODS extension

Several documentation and tool improvements by Filipe Correia

MOAI 1.1.2 (2010-09-30)

Changed contact info, and switched repository from svn to mercurial
this release has no code changes

Changes

MOAI 1.1.1 (2010-09-02)

Changes

Fixed ID/IDref attributes in MODS format

Fixed ZeroDivisionError in progressbar drawing of updatedb script

MOAI 1.1.0 (2010-04-08)

Changes

Added new config option deleted_sets which can be used to make all
resources within a specific set oai deleted within the context of a
specific feed. In many cases this is preferable compared to disallowed_sets
since resources will just dissapear when they are not allowed without
leaving a proper deleted resource behind.